Saturation is designed to avoid neon colors. If you increase chroma too much, you easily get colors that seem to glow. Saturation alleviates this by slightly darkening as you increase it, and slightly lightening as you decrease it.

Masks are a good option, but skin is often in the midtones, so if you increase saturation in the midtones you often get good results. Also, I've been playing with the shadows and highlights falloff in the masks tab, as well as where both areas overlap.

Once color equalizer is merged, you will be able to target specific hues much quicker, though.

Hope that helps